SOCIOPLASTICS - 3496 — Archive as Digestive Surface - Metabolic Legibility and the Care of Overfull Corpora - Core VIII · Pentagon I · Tome IV · LAPIEZA-LAB, Madrid 2026

This paper proposes the archive as a digestive surface rather than a passive container of preserved material. Under conditions of radical abundance, the central archival problem is no longer access but orientation: how accumulated documents, fragments, metadata and traces remain inhabitable after exceeding the scale of ordinary reading. The paper develops Metabolic Legibility as the capacity of a corpus to receive, compress, reabsorb and transform its own materials while remaining readable, navigable and generative. Through the regimes of anabolic accumulation, catabolic pruning and autophagic recomposition, it reframes archival care as an infrastructural, aesthetic and epistemic practice.